Charles B. Wang, co-founder of Computer Associates, has died | Hacker News Reader

Charles B. Wang, co-founder of Computer Associates, has died

nytimes.com

53 pointsElement_8 comments

10+ years ago, I had the opportunity to pitch to Charles and his wife.

His advice to us was stop trying to raise money and “Just fucking do it.”

If you’ve never read the history of the company he founded, Computer Associates, it’s an interesting story of growth by M&A - at one time it was the largest software company in the world, ahead of Microsoft. http://www.company-histories.com/Computer-Associates-Interna...

RIP Charles.

Interesting link!

> After an initial failure, he succeeded with CA-SORT, a program enabling computers to sort through data quickly and economically. Wang's SORT offered competition to a similar IBM program, and Wang convinced many businesses with IBM hardware to change over to CA's product. Mainframe software was licensed rather than sold, and the recurring revenue from the licenses of the SORT software was a great boost to Computer Associates.

Interesting to note that legacy mainframe sorting isn't just moving values around in memory like all the algorithms we mostly study today. Mainframes back then had vanishingly small amounts of RAM (compared to what we have today) and had to use tape and later disk (dasd) for any real storage. So this type of sort is known as disk or tape sort. One "nicety" was that most records on tape (and subsequently disk) were "fixed" length, so could count on advancing x number of bytes reliably for next/prev record etc.

It was a different era for sure.

In the same breath... "The company was at first funded only by Wang's various credit cards."

So it may have turned out differently without that 'invention' for funding.

Most credit card limits don't touch what a company'd be asking a VC, dontcha think?

Across a few banks, I have more credit card credit available in aggregate (acquired over only a few months) than YC offers in funding to startups they accelerate (Chase alone will approve you up to almost $100k across several cards before their risk management department starts asking questions).

This is not difficult to accomplish for your average credit consumer, and if your burn rate is low and you have some reasonable path to profitability, it’s superior to taking investment.

Sold my first spreadsheet with macros build in SuperCalc 1 to the dutch government. What a time.

Do you know if they are still using it?

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